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What's New in 0.3?

I am pleased to release version 0.3 of Scribes. Scribes is a text editor that uniquely balances simplicity with power. This release is a significant milestone in providing you with an enjoyable text editing experience. Bugs were squashed, new features implemented, countless enhancements made and numerous performance optimizations tweaked. It is strongly recommended that you upgrade to the new version.

Kindly support the project by donating.

Network Transparency

Scribes can now access files at remote locations over ssh, ftp, sftp, webdav, webdavs and samba protocols. Press (control - l) to expose the interface to access documents stored at remote locations.

Importing and Exporting Templates

Surely, by now you are intoxicated by the power of dynamic templates popularly called snippets. See the flash demo to witness it in action. Scribes now allows you import or export templates so you can share them easily. You can get pre-made templates from here.

Automatic Pair Character Completion and Smart Insertion

Bracket completion got smarter. Scribes automatically inserts closing pair characters when their opening pair is typed into the buffer. Pressing the closing pair characters will intelligently move the cursor outside the pair characters. The Esc key also serves the same purpose. You can also enclose selected text in pair characters simply by pressing the opening pair. Pair completion is a nifty error prevention utility.

Auto-Completion

Tired of typing the same word repeatedly? Scribes implements automatic word completion which mitigates the monotonousness of typing long words over and over again. Thus, reducing typing and possible spelling or syntax errors.

Performance Optimizations

Scribes now uses Psyco if it is installed on your system. Psyco is a performance optimizing compiler for Python. Psyco improves performance at the expense of memory usage.

Power in Processing

A text editor with little or no text processing capabilities is like a plane that can't fly. Scribes provides numerous text processing functions to meet your most crucial text editing needs. Scribes lets you; select words, statements, lines, paragraphs and even text with pair characters; change the case of selected text; truncate, delete, join and open new lines; convert tabs to spaces and vice versa; format lines via indentation; remove trailing spaces at the end of documents; navigate easily across large documents; search for text within documents, jump to specific lines and more. All these operations are available via shortcut keys and most of them are present in the pop-up menu.

Fluid Navigation

Bookmarks allow you to mark important lines in a document. The marked lines can be quickly navigated to when desired. The bookmark browser is a window that lists all marked lines in a document. You can navigate to bookmarks via the bookmark browser. Press (control - d) to bookmark a line. Press (control - b) to show the bookmark browser. Commands for performing other bookmark operations are present in the pop-up menu. Bookmarks are an efficient way to navigate large documents.

Enhanced Search

Scribes now implements more searching techniques. New in this release is incremental searching. Press (control - k) to show the incremental search bar and search incrementally. If you have have already searched the buffer for a string, you can simply press (control - g) to restart searching without showing the search bar. Pressing (control - g) also allows you to navigate to the next match and (control - shift - g) to the previous one. Searching and replacing now have numerous enhancements that provide visual and better feedback.

Document Switcher

The document switcher is a better, efficient and scalable alternative to Tabs. The document switcher allows you to focus any document open by Scribes by simply pressing F9.

One document Per Window

Scribes now opens only one instance of a document. This means one document can only have one Scribes window.

Recent Documents

You can now open recently used documents via a menu on the toolbar.

Lexical Scope Highlight

Text within most pair characters are now highlighted. The color of highlight can be changed in GConf.

User Guide

The user guide has been restructured and updated to reflect the new features in Scribes. Press F1 to launch the user guide.

Many more...

The enhancements that have gone into this release are too numerous to mention. Thanks to the Scribes community for their patience, contribution and feedback.

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